Connecticut

If she had not slept with someone else they would probably still be married, floating through their days together but apart, both of them quietly unhappy and neither of them saying it out loud. In this way, marriage is not that different from any other relationship, where it is easy to remain stagnant when things seem sort of fine and there is no elephant in the living room demanding to be dealt with. (Most people, probably, go through life like this.) But she did it and he found out about it and there, in the living room, sat the elephant. The divorce was quick and uncontested, and after he sat in the house, alone, on Thanksgiving. (It isn’t that he was totally innocent, it must be understood—no one really ever is—but there are lines you cross and then there are lines. you. cross.) It had all crashed and burned just months before the pandemic, which was inopportune timing to try to make a new life, but he did it, somehow, and is now more than a year into a relationship with someone else. They are happy, he says. He is happy, he thinks. But love, and marriage, and the future—the documents you sign together in optimism, the documents you sign later undoing that optimism—all of those things he held and then let go of seem much more real now. They are not daydreams and happy endings, but things to be cautious about, to take your time with. He told this to a friend, who shrugged. “You’re right,” she said, “but at some point, that decision is always a leap of faith.”

the East Coast

It was, she thought, the seven-year itch, come to roost a bit early. She knew this was not uncommon—it had its own name, after all, and in conversations with friends of late she had learned that actually everyone was kind of miserable—but she hadn’t asked (and they hadn’t offered) whether they, too, looked hungrily at every passing body or were lit on fire by every man who flirted or complimented, or slid his eyes in their direction, or adjusted his shirt cuff in a certain way. She jotted her thoughts in a notebook, paragraphs of euphemisms and lists of desires that seemed ridiculous before the ink had even dried on the page. She had not done anything yet, but that was the thing, the “yet,” and suddenly it seemed sort of inevitable, even though she knew better, even as she told herself that she could and she would and she must hold back. She reminded herself of everything in her life, held carelessly now in her palm, all of it more likely to fall away the closer she stepped to that edge. Inject him into my veins, she wrote. Get a grip, she whispered to empty rooms. In the end, despite the fervor, she knew she probably wouldn’t ever be able to do it. It’s just that now she understood how people do.

Maryland

She had known for years that her genes were shit. It was why she had opted for a preemptive mastectomy, choosing to remove both of her breasts and walk through the world permanently changed in that very particular aftermath. It was just that she thought that decision would buy her time, that it would count for something, that because she walked through that fire, her family’s particular concoction of dark cells would not catch up with her until later. She thought that by literally sacrificing her flesh she might curry favor with whatever entity decides these things. But it turns out that it’s all a crapshoot. She gets a kidney infection, and antibiotics make it better. It comes back weeks later. The antibiotics help with the pain, again, but her blood and urine tests are a confusing hodgepodge of abnormalities, high and low numbers bolded on the paper, everything all over the place except for the one—the white blood cell count—that could quickly dismiss the whole experience as just a stubborn and ongoing infection. The doctor refers her to a specialist, who tells her it’s either nothing or the thing, and then sends her for a CT scan. Lying in the machine, she thinks of her children. She thinks of her husband, of all the years lying in front of them, of all that they have already weathered. She knows that it will be whatever it will be. She is ready to know. And also she isn’t.

other people's stories, chapter two